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Can IRS Levy Reach Future Rent Payments?

Posted on Sep. 28, 2021

A relatively brief CCA issued this month discusses the IRS’s ability to levy on the right to receive rent payments beyond the date of the levy. The CCA explores the rationale as to why a single levy may have continuous legal effect that will extent to the right to receive future payments, a topic I discussed recently in Levy on Social Security Benefits: IRS Taking Payments Beyond Ten Years of Assessment Still Timely. It also explores whether the IRS is required to use a Form 668-A to effectuate the levy, as it appears that an IRS employee had arguably mistakenly served a Form 668-W. Form 668-W is typically associated with continuous wage levies.

As Keith has patiently explained to me (and readers of both the blog and the Saltzman and Book treatise), there are two types of levies: 1) one-time events and 2) continuous wage levies.  The one time event levies come in two varieties: 1) bank levies where the IRS gets what is in the bank that day or other similar levies where the IRS reaches a static asset and 2) levies that reach an asset with future fixed payments.  Lots of people have trouble distinguishing between continuous wage levies and levies with fixed future payments, and it appears that the mistaken form IRS used reflects some of that confusion.

The levy involved in this CCA reaches an asset with fixed future payments. As the CCA explains, “rental income is generally subject to a levy with continuous effect meaning that, to the extent that future rental liabilities are fixed and determinable, meaning the terms are provided for in a rental contract, the single levy reaches both current and future rental payments.”

There are a handful of cases that apply this principle in the context of rental income, including United States v. Halsey, Civ. A.  No. 85-1266, 1986 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24130 (C.D.Ill.1986). One wrinkle in the CCA is that the lease was a month-to-month, but as the CCA explains

that [the] lease was a month-to-month lease does not affect the levy’s attachment to future payments. The levy was effective to reach future payments not by reason of the fact that it continued to operate beyond the time at which it was made, which it does not, but rather because the levy reached Plaintiff’s then existing right to the future payments under the lease, not the future payments themselves.

The CCA concludes that the Service’s use of the Form 668-W (meant for wages and allowing for exemptions under 6334(a)) in the context of rental income does not invalidate the levy, relying on there essentially being no material harm by the use of the improper form and that there is no authority concluding that the Service use a particular form for effectuating the levy.

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